


The World Begins Behind Your Neighbor's Wall

by pedalpusher



Series: The Day I Can Control Myself [3]
Category: Music RPF, Rock Music RPF, The Who (Band)
Genre: Airplanes, Banter, Enemies to Lovers, Historical Accuracy, Historical Inaccuracy, Hotel Sex, M/M, Touring, frenemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2020-06-29 23:02:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,144
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19840336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pedalpusher/pseuds/pedalpusher
Summary: There ain't no way out.





	1. Chapter 1

A letter postmarked sometime in mid-August, 1975:

_Dear Roger_

_I’m writing because I don’t believe you and I have corresponded directly in a long time. We have obviously done so indirectly, and needlessly cruelly. I’d like to remedy that situation, and offer my sincere apologies._

_I never intended for you to take those comments in the NME to heart, or anything I’ve ever offered up to a journalist in the heat of the moment. I get ahead of myself, as you know. I have the unfortunate tendency to say exactly what I’m thinking when prompted, even if it only represents a fraction of my feelings on the matter at hand, or if those feelings are liable to change. I spoke offhandedly and callously, without regard for the consequences. For that I am sorry. This was my fault._

_It occurs to me that much of our difficulty lately stems from the fracture between the band and its soon-to-be-former management. You must understand the loyalty I have felt to Kit and to Chris. They were our very first advisors, true creative counsel, and I think you know as much as I do that without their support we wouldn’t be here. Or at the very least, we wouldn’t be the same. They encouraged me, encouraged us, and it blinded me to their misdeeds. I still love them, and don’t believe they ever truly meant us harm. But to your judgment, I will yield. Whatever decisions you make as this all progresses, I will throw myself behind them fully._

_YOU have encouraged me. You have been loyal to me, always. I ought to be grateful, because I know you have consistently kept the best interests of the band at heart, myself included, and you are objective about all this in a way I am incapable of achieving._

_Are we friends? I’d like to think so. I hope so. There was a time many years ago when I wasn’t sure. And then there were times where I was certain we were something much bigger than that. I don’t know if there is a word for it yet. I’ll have to think hard on that one. You can let me know your thoughts. I’d look forward to hearing them._

_Karen and the girls and I will be en route to the States very shortly, for a long-neglected and proper vacation in Myrtle Beach. You know how to reach me._

_Speak soon._

_Love_

_Pete_

_P.S._

_CHAMPION, I think, is somewhere in the realm of the word I am looking for. That is what you have been for me._


	2. Chapter 2

_November 18, 1975_

_Somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean_

Drifting, sinking, into the cold, deep dark. It’s peaceful, like slipping into bed sheets, until the bright blue darkens to navy and then black. The embrace of the sea becomes the weight of a thousand fathoms above him, crushing against his chest, collapsing his ribs like a pile of matchsticks.

The bright beacon of the sun on the surface is lost to him now, and he falls through the depths like a stone.

He opens his mouth to scream and the frigid scald of saltwater fills his lungs.

Pete awakens with a gasp, sucking in a gulp of stale cabin air. The inside of his chest stings a little, psychosomatic afterburn.

John is beside him in the window seat, ankle perched on his knee, a book cradled in hand and steadied against his leg. He has the air of a gentleman even in his noisily eccentric suit, which is comprised of technicolor stripes approximating a migraine aura. Pete, who is still nauseated by air travel and blinking away the psychic scraps of REM sleep, tries not to look directly at him.

John doesn’t bother glancing up from his book. “Bad dream?”

Pete fishes around in his pockets for a cigarette, but the pack is gone, and the meager weight of the flask in his jacket suggests he’s out of luck there, too. “Something like that.”

Keith and Roger are both fully out in the seats across from them, Keith with his head propped up against the window cover and jaw hanging open, and Roger with his face in Keith’s shoulder. There is an abandoned spread of cards on the table between them, highball glasses half-filled with mostly melting ice, and magazines of questionable taste.

Posh as a private plane may be, no manner of embellishments can supplant the basic premise, which is that the four of them are packed into a flimsy aluminum can hurtling across the Atlantic. Two of them have at least figured out how to sleep through it.

“I have no idea how they manage,” Pete sighs.

“Brandy,” says John, matter-of-factly, gesturing at Keith. And then nods to Roger. “As for that one, well, you of all people should know the man doesn’t sleep at night.”

Pete gives him a sideways glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Must be knackered. That’s insomnia for you. Can’t sleep when you’re meant to, so you wind up passing out when you aren’t.”

Pete affixes his eyes back to Roger, as if so doing might force him to awaken. They hit a few rapid-fire bumps of turbulence, and in a plane of this size it’s like throwing marbles around in a tin. Keith’s head bangs limply against the inside of the fuselage, which doesn’t wake him, but arranges his head such that he begins to snore. Roger burrows into him like a pillow.

“Careful, you’ll burn a pair of holes through him,” says John. “I thought you two patched things up.”

Pete isn’t too fond of the sound of that, like he and Roger are two halves of a bad marriage, and tightens his grip on the armrests.

“We have,” he says, meekly, recalling how Roger had hugged him at the airport terminal at the very start of the tour, first time seeing one another in the flesh for many months, first time speaking outside of traded barbs in the press. It was with that same clean-slate fondness that always reunited them, like nothing had ever happened to drive a wedge in the first place. Pete supposes he should be grateful that Roger lets go of a grudge as easily as he finds reason to hold one. “Wrote him a proper letter, I did. I said I’d back him over this whole management nightmare, and I even told him I was sorry for being a prick in the _NME_.”

“And _Melody Maker_. And _Creem_.”

Pete toes the sole of John’s boot with his own, knocking his leg back to the floor. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“Strictly my own,” John informs him, but a little smile curls his lip. “Lone agent, if I intend to come out of this tour alive.”

“I’ll be grateful if we make it through this flight alive. What’s the matter with you, reading a book called ‘Crash’ on an airplane, it’s a foul omen. I always knew you were morbid, but this is beyond the pale. Tempting fate.”

“It’s about car crashes, actually, not plane crashes.”

“Well _that’s_ comforting, that makes it all just fine, then.”

“In fact, it’s about people who derive sexual gratification from car crashes. You know. Excitement. Destruction.” John folds the book on his knee. He brings his hands together and then splays his fingers out to illustrate, his assortment of rings glittering. “It’s like, the eroticism of sublimated violence. _Pow_.”

Pete recoils, swivels round in his seat to make a face at John, but he also finds the concept makes a worrisome amount of sense.

“Pow,” Pete repeats.

John nods sagely.

Pete shakes off a disconcerting jumble of thoughts at that, Roger unfortunately dead center within them, and it prompts him to stick his leg out under the table, start prodding at the little singer.

“All right, Sleeping Beauty,” he announces. “I hate to interrupt, but you’ve stolen something very important of mine.”

That elicits a grunt and a totally unintelligible stream of mumbling. Keith’s head tips over onto Roger’s, and the snoring becomes oppressively bad, like a wind instrument possessed by the devil. Pete winces.

“Jesus Christ, if that isn’t the most terrible noise you’ve heard in your life.”

John snickers, returning to his book. “Short of the four of us, you mean?”

“Come on then. Up, up, up,” says Pete, punctuating each syllable with another thrust of his boot.

Roger sits upright, comically aggrieved, not even opening his eyes but slumping over the table on his elbows, face in his palms. Keith slips down without the support of Roger’s body and startles awake. He swerves his head around manically, like he’s forgotten they were airborne.

“You stole them from _me_ ,” Roger insists, annoyed, voice gravelly from sleep. Pete can’t help but grin a little at the sight of him. “They were _my_ bloody cigarettes and you took them out of _my_ jacket.”

“I _appropriated_ them,” Pete clarifies.

Roger drops his arms to the table and stares at him, incredulous. Keith, who has finally absorbed their situation, deemed it acceptable, reaches over and pats Roger’s hair.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he says through a yawn. “You’ve drooled all over me finest vestments.”

“Ugh,” replies Roger, groggily, and it’s less likely an observation on Keith’s clothes than a comment directed at Pete.

Pete smiles at him real big, teeth catching on his lower lip, because he knows Roger can’t resist that, won’t stay angry if he’s winking at making a pass. Even after this long, there’s a silent dialect between the two of them, and he falls back into it too easily, their evolved repertoire of sidelong and double-edged gestures.

Pete would prefer to be anywhere but here, but if he absolutely must be careening toward America with the world’s most uncontrollable group of geezers, he can at least admit that he had missed this part.

Roger softens, predictably, and draws the pack of smokes out from his pocket. Keith reaches over and flicks the back of John’s book. With his nose still buried in the pages, John rifles through his blazer for his own stash. There is a simultaneous exchange of cigarettes across the table, a mirrored image of extended arms.

Roger draws one out for himself, wags his eyebrows at Pete by way of reminder. Pete locates the lighter he has managed to retain possession of, and fires them all up, Roger last. When their eyes meet, he feels their own little spark fly out, burn hot for a precious moment before it fizzles.

Roger is always the one to falter first and look away. There’s some enduring satisfaction in that, petty as it may be. Pete can at least recognize when he is succumbing to his less dignified impulses. Roger has the unsettling and consistent ability to draw that out of him.

This is also, in a way, the fundamental nature of the band, and the act of touring: a calculated harnessing of baser instinct, the worst of their violence and carnality organized into sound, and then ritualistically discharged. And he supposes it is root of his discomfort, why they have to drag him kicking and screaming back on the road for each successive jaunt among the country’s arenas. It is demented, really, that he can aspire to such heights of spiritual transcendence in his art, devote himself utterly to the carrying out of Baba’s message of love and peace, and yet be doomed to locate the nexus point of his own salvation, time and time again, within the dirty business of rock ‘n’ roll. It feels terribly like the opposite, like being condemned to hellfire. The long stretches of time spent away from his wife and children, the drinking and the drugs and debauchery. Violence and chaos. Nauseating airplane turbulence.

All this for the increasingly momentary payoff of gazing out into an audience and seeing himself reflected, reified, brought back to life in the eyes of thousands of souls screaming his own words back at him.

If they only knew what he wrung out of himself for a few pithy hours of entertainment.

Keith produces a bottle of brandy like a magician draws a rabbit from a hat, from unseen origin and with inexplicable facility, and goes to refill their glasses. It would be amusing, if Keith’s drinking were not becoming progressively less amusing.

“I’m good, thanks,” Pete reminds him, knuckling the glass away. The empty flask, a masochistic totem, nonetheless resides permanently in his blazer pocket. Somehow the weight of it approximates a ball and chain. “Feeling quite ill from all this bouncing around.”

Roger has resumed watching him in a way that Pete finds frustratingly indecipherable. It might be the haze of smoke in the cabin.

“I’m all right, too, Keith,” Roger says, with his eyes still on Pete’s face.

Keith shrugs, disappears the bottle again, and empties the contents of both Pete and Roger’s glasses into his own. John folds his book and reaches over to take it, permitting himself a few sips. Keith throws his hands up in mock indignation.

John grins at him. “If I’m to last the rest of this flight with you, I’ll need a head start.”

There’s thumping sounds from underneath the table, Keith rummaging, and then his bare feet materialize on John’s lap.

“I can last all night, darling,” he coos, batting his eyelashes. John tolerates this with characteristic equanimity, and ashes his cigarette on Keith’s toes.

The jet passes through another pocket of burbling air, and the whole thing rattles as if in protest. Pete rubs at his face in dismay. Roger unbuckles his seatbelt spontaneously and goes marching down the aisle for the set of coolers in back.

“You’re going to be batted around like a pinball,” Pete warns, twisting around in his seat to call after him.

“Wouldn’t that be appropriate,” Roger says, undisturbed. He sways a bit with the motion of the plane, and rebounds off one of the garishly colored couches in back. With some effort, he manages to retrieve a couple of cans of Coke and stagger back up to the front of the cabin. He plunks back down next to Keith, hurriedly re-affixes his seatbelt, and hands one of them off to Pete.

“Thanks,” Pete mumbles, realizing that this is a bizarre gesture of solidarity. Since he’s quit drinking, he’s been chain-smoking, going through soft drinks by the case. It’s hardly an equivalent substitute but it gives him something to do with his hands. He cracks the can and takes a swig.

Keith gathers the playing cards up from the table, shuffling them back into a semblance of a full deck. He fans them out in front of John, face down.

“Pick a card,” he says.

“Oh, no,” John drones, apprehensively. “I’m not falling for whatever this is.”

“He’s already fallen for my devilish charms,” Keith counters, and presents them instead to Pete. “Go on, Townshend.”

“I’m afraid I’m with our man John on this one.”

“Wretched bastards, the both of you.” He swerves into Roger with the most painted-on, supplicating expression, and with enough unwieldy momentum to knock them both into the armrest. Keith’s face is practically in his neck, which Roger endures with a long-suffering but genuinely sweet smile, having spent the majority of the last decade allowing Keith to knock them both bodily around like a couple of bowling pins.

“Roger, my dear,” Keith pleads, with the cards shoved out in front of him. “My oldest and most treasured friend. My sole, deepest, profound companion! Voice of an angel. Hair of a Grecian maiden. Chest of a bloody Michelangelo painting—”

John plays at an offended sneer and shoves Keith’s feet off him. “Lousy flatterer, you are. You may find my affections as fickle as your own, Moon.”

“You wish, Enty.” Keith drops precipitously down in the seat, the better to maneuver his foot back up and under the table, wiggle his toes perilously close to John’s face. John recoils in horror.

Pete raps the Coke can on the table like a gavel. “Order, order! Order I say. Or I’ll have you both held in contempt.”

“By all means, do go on,” encourages Roger, facing Keith with his chin resting in hand, leisurely propped on his elbow. “I was enjoying the part about the Michelangelo painting.”

Automatically, Pete shoves his knee into Roger’s, and feels a current pass between them at the contact. “Yes, please continue. He doesn’t have nearly enough magazine editorials in circulation to remind him he’s the pretty one in the band.”

Roger grins sharply at him, and Pete truly resents that this makes his heart skip. “You think I’m pretty?”

“Like a car fire.”

“That’s a lovely compliment, Pete, in your own fucked up sort of way, thank you.”

“Right, well don’t let it go to your head.”

Keith flaps the fan of cards urgently. “If one of you doesn’t pick a card I will hijack this plane, skip right over New York and fly us straight to Las Vegas, and then it will be fucking cards everywhere, cards coming out your arse.”

John tips his brandy glass pointedly at Keith. “Don’t believe we have enough fuel to make it to Vegas.”

“I stand corrected. If none of you picks a card, I am going to hijack this plane, and we’re all going to die.”

Pete skates his boot up Roger’s shin under the table, and for and for an electrifying, victorious moment, watches as Roger jolts up to attention.

“Then it’s sorted,” Roger says, with a tremor so faint that only Pete catches it, because he’s heard it in his voice before. “I suppose all our lives are in my hands.”

“Choose wisely,” advises John. “We’re at your mercy.”

“I’d say it’s been nice knowing you lot,” Pete adds, “in case we don’t make it, but I think we all know that’s a serious exaggeration, bordering on falsity.”

He receives a solid kick to his shin in retaliation.

“Ow, _fuckin’ell!_ ”

“Pipe down, will you, I’m thinking.” Roger furrows his brow, performatively focused. He feigns at picking a few cards before he finally selects one dead center, drawing it up to his face to examine it. “All right, how’s this one. it’s a—”

“No, no!” Keith howls. “Don’t _tell_ me what it is, you daft git, haven’t you ever seen a card trick in your life?”

John folds over the table into his arms, shaking with silent laughter, while Pete grins wickedly. Roger sighs.

“Just _remember_ what it is. Show it to them, not me. And then you put it back in the deck, face down.”

Keith leans back against the window and squeezes his eyes shut with great resolve. Roger offers the card to Pete and John for appraisal. They nod approvingly. Yes, it is the two of hearts, indeed.

Roger shoves it back into the spread, and Keith pitches forward again, shuffling the cards together with crazed, sloppy determination. Occasionally he drops one or two beneath the table, upon which John helpfully retrieves them, only to have Keith snarl and snap and swat at his efforts like a mad dog guarding a casino table. John doesn’t seem terribly bothered by this.

This goes on for an interminably long time, Pete and Roger each draining their respective soda cans, John nursing incrementally at Keith’s brandy, soon picking up his book again. They smoke in patient, pleasant silence. No one dares to interrupt the very involved process of Keith’s shuffling. It’s meditative, in a way.

Roger crosses his legs and rests his boot against Pete’s shin, right at the point where he’d struck him earlier. With John having resumed his reading, and Keith psychotically preoccupied, Pete has the chance to inspect him with the full and fierce extent of his capabilities, and the thought strikes him briefly that he’s possibly getting too cavalier about this, staring Roger down in public like he’s going to fight him or fuck him. Emphasis decidedly on the latter.

(That has happened once already, and it had been shamefully, dangerously enjoyable, the kind of accident which one studiously avoids repeating and yet dwells upon obsessively. Pete is tempted to blame Keith for that episode, but he figures it would have happened eventually of its own accord. Something about kissing Roger, and falling into bed with Roger, bore the weight of inevitability.)

Speaking of card games, Roger’s gotten better at his poker face during the band’s respite. The man is an open book when he’s smiling or laughing—and Roger really is pretty; that is the awful, complicating fact of the matter—so he’s easy to read, and unfortunately easy to linger a bit too long on.

But Pete can’t figure out what this particular look means, not for the life of him, and that abrades his confidence.

At long last, Keith announces, “ _Gentlemen_ ,” and reaches out to the center of the table, neatly stacked deck of cards in hand. Pete temporarily gives up on the process of picking his bandmate apart like a convoluted riddle.

“The object of the trick,” John explains, without looking up, “is to present you with the card you originally selected.”

“Don’t worry, I sussed that part out,” Roger retorts.

“Shh, don’t spoil it,” Keith hisses, and then turns to Roger, gravely serious. “Roger, I am going to present you with the card you originally selected.”

“Are you?” Pete interrogates. “Are you really?”

“I can’t contain my excitement,” says Roger.

At that, Keith pulls his fingers toward his thumb, bending the deck into a stiff arc that suddenly explodes and sprays upwards, sending a wild stream of cards all throughout the cabin. Pete and Roger make a resigned attempt to shield their faces, and John startles violently, dropping the book down with a thud, staring daggers at Keith. Keith smiles cheerily, and takes the brandy glass back from John’s side of the table.

“Ta-da,” he says, and finishes what’s left in it. Roger shakes his head, and then starts up with that goofy, disarming laugh of his.

“Well,” Pete observes, steepling his fingers against his chin but unable to extinguish a smile, “one of those is in fact the card Roger originally selected.”

“Yeah, somewhere in there.”

“I’m not picking that up,” John says with his arms crossed.

“It’s decorative,” says Keith, gesturing expansively. “Ambiance.”

“I thought your idea of ambiance was champagne and abundant whores.”

“ _Abundant_ champagne and _abundant_ whores,” Keith corrects. “Equal quantities. You can’t have one without the other. It’s inalienable, like the laws of physics.” He pauses to think this over further, then waves wildly at John with the force of his epiphany. “…And for God’s sake, so’s yours! Glass houses, mate!”

“Fair enough, I’ll give you that.”

There’s a card stuck upright against the fabric of Roger’s shirt, leaned up against the seat just under his ear. Pete reaches over and retrieves it, turns it back and forth in his hand. Nine of hearts. The rest of them gleam around the floor like tiles.

“You know, I’ll never get used to it,” Pete comments idly. “When we go to America, we’re always going backwards in time.”

“And you tell me _I’m_ strange,” remarks John.

“You mean the jet lag?” Roger asks. Absentmindedly, he rubs at his shoulder where Pete had plucked the card away.

Pete nods. “The time change, yes. But I mean the concept, not just the effect on our schedule. We’re always rewinding, a little bit. It’s like we’re returning in more ways than one.”

“What about going home, then?” Roger reaches over and pulls the window shade back open next to Keith, introducing a brilliant stream of white light. Keith shakes his head and blinks, like he’s been struck by a physical force. “That must mean we’re always getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Skipping something over on our way back to England.”

“I suppose that’s the corollary, yeah.”

“It’s _time zones_ ,” insists Keith, baffled by this philosophical exchange, and pawing at his eyeballs like the sunlight is an affront to his very existence. “It’s not real, it’s just… you know.” He waves his hand vaguely. “Something we invented so it doesn’t get dark at weird hours in weird places.”

“Spoken like an Oxford scholar.”

“Cheers, John, I appreciate that.” Keith elbows at Roger, canting over to address him in a stage whisper, his eyes hovering on Pete. “He’s barmy, that one. Full of strange ideas. Dark moods. Indulge him at risk of your own sanity.”

There’s some truth to this, Pete muses. Roger snorts in response, but there’s a look of real serenity there, and he speaks with the same honest, even courageous appreciation with which he’s received all of Pete’s ideas, however strange their content, or dark Pete’s mood.

“Well, we indulged your card trick, didn’t we. If he’s mad, it’s gotten us this far. Further than most. I think we can trust that he’ll take us where we ought to be going.”

Pete raises the Coke can modestly, intending a toast, but he feels a burst of consuming affection for Roger in that moment, and then for the band, despite the nature of his predicament. There is no circumventing the gratitude for what they’ve permitted him to express, all the work which they’ve diligently channeled. For the worst of the mayhem, he is compensated with a pure, almost innocent lack of judgment.

He’s trapped like an animal among the fellow animals who would fight and die by his side, if it came to that. They might bring out the worst in him, but they take Pete for who he is. No questions asked.

It strikes him that Roger has never complained about this state of affairs, nor questioned the need for it. And then, with frightened admiration, comes the realization that maybe Roger could convince him to do this forever. If anyone could, that is. Coasting on roiling air streams across the Atlantic, backward and forward in time. The thing he dreads most. The thing he always comes back to.

“I’ll drink to that,” Pete says quietly.

Roger beams a glowing smile, and clinks his can with his. “To being barmy.”

John nods appreciatively, and Keith hoists the empty brandy glass high, his dark eyes glinting fiercely.

“To madness,” he crows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why! Can I not! Stop writing these two! Gosh, I love them. This whole exercise is turning out way longer than I anticipated. I don't usually like to post a work in progress, but I'd like to get the ball rolling, and provide myself some manufactured encouragement. I think there will be five chapters? Five seems about right.
> 
> Having a go at Pete's POV this time around, and boy is he a tough nut to crack. As usual, all events in this fic are structured around the skeletal premise of historical accuracy. Pete and Roger really did get into a series of secondhand spats via magazine interviews in 1975, which Pete, obviously, did his best to instigate. He came around and apologized via letter, and the band embarked on another European and U.S. tour shortly thereafter. I don't know if they actually took a private jet to America this time around. In fact, I'm willing to bet they didn't. But the possibilities of jamming the four of them into a confined space were too enjoyable to resist.
> 
> I think Keith and John are on to something.


	3. Chapter 3

_Houston, Texas_

_November 19-20, 1975_

They stop in New York to refuel and squeeze in a shoddy night’s rest, and then it’s onward to Houston, where the Gulf pulls in a humid breeze as they emerge on the tarmac. The sun is only just setting here, but the band is still reeling their souls back in over the ocean. It is the dead of night in England.

Their management has alighted as of the night before, and arranged for a pair of private cars, eerily identical but for the license plates. Keith and John have shared a driver since their early days and file automatically toward one of the black Cadillacs, bags slung over shoulders, not so much walking as lumbering drearily. Pete throws his carry-on into the trunk of the other one, batting away the driver’s persistent attempts to help. When he folds himself into the leather seat, Roger is already propped up against the tinted window across from him, duffel hugged to his lap. There are a pair of sunglasses perched on his nose despite the fading daylight, which makes it impossible to tell if he is asleep or awake. Pete clutches at his knees and doesn’t trouble himself with finding out.

The landscape that passes on their way to the hotel is wide and bewilderingly flat, the level of its topography interrupted only by streetlamps and road signs, and in the distance the modest cluster of buildings at the city’s center. As the evening fades from orange to navy to black, the horizon line seems to him increasingly fragile. A bleeding boundary that fails to delineate the earth from the sky.

If it’s not exactly a comfortable silence between them, at least it’s a familiar one. Pete finds the giddy allure of goading at Roger has evaporated somewhat, lacking an audience, and without Keith and John around to enable the circus and diffuse the tension, sharing close quarters doesn’t feel like fun and games anymore. By the time they arrive at their destination, diverted briefly by a missed exit off the motorway, the rhythm section of The Who has retired to their private suites. Pete and Roger check in under assumed names, pile into the lift, and exit into yet another carpeted hallway, the vague scent of cigarette smoke and stale cleaning fluid sticking to the wallpaper. In every city, some variation on the same.

Roger’s suite is on the opposite end of the floor. As he departs down the corridor, Pete says to him, experimentally, “G’night, Roger.”

“Night, Pete,” he replies, noncommittally pleasant, glance thrown over his shoulder. The sunglasses are hanging off his collar, now, but his eyes are unreadable. “See you in the morning.”

Pete watches him disappear around a corner, holding in a sigh. He wanders the east wing of the building like a rat in a maze, not genuinely lost but rather ignoring the plaques on the wall and their helpful arrows, whimsically taken with the idea of traipsing around directionless. He thinks he does a lap or two before his feet begin to drag, and then he locates Room 2008 in surrender, turning the key in the latch like an astronaut disembarking into an alien world.

He drops his things, plods zombielike to the bed without removing his boots, and collapses face-down. After some time spent communing with the mattress at close range, he rolls over and pulls the receiver off the bedside telephone, prepared to dial Karen and the girls until he remembers it’s some ungodly hour back home. He holds it to his chest instead of hanging it up, listening to the dull hum of the dial tone, steady and unrelenting.

The dream that takes hold brings him back to the water again, rollicking on top of the waves this time, far preferable to plummeting into their depths. The sailboat he finds himself on, concocted by his subconscious to be more like an oversized toy than a proper seafaring vessel, is literally how he would have imagined them as a child in streaky crayon drawings. It’s shapes and colors without detail, an assemblage of geometric parts. It’s fascinating to observe until the thunderheads start taking shape in the distance, a vitriolic mass surging upward and outward with terrifying speed, and the next thing he knows he’s trying to keep the stupid dream-toy-boat upright in a maelstrom of raindrops the size of tennis balls, see-sawing in the wind.

In response, the toy-boat flashes red lights and blares a deafening staccato alarm, from whence within its incomprehensible structure Pete hasn’t the foggiest idea. It’s not like he needs the warning. He knows he’s in trouble now, that the dream narrative is encroaching into nightmare territory.

He jerks up with a start to a series of loud bangs, brain whirring and staggering back to waking life. The phone, still pulled by its cord across his chest, slides off and down to the floor. The dial tone has turned over to the stuttering whine of a line off its hook. Its rapid-fire rhythm is the same as the boat alarm. When the banging commences again, it dawns on him that someone is outside his door pounding on it like the bleeding police.

He drops flat to the bed again, knuckling at his eyes. “All right, all right,” he shouts.

It takes several more seconds worth of banging before he musters the resolve to haul himself up and address the ruckus. When he pulls the door open, Bill Curbishley’s no-bullshit face is staring straight back at him, unsurprised but also unamused.

“I’ve called and fucking called, Pete. Concierge told me the line was dead. I’m your manager, not the nanny. Are you out of your mind?”

Pete takes a moment to seriously mull that over, and ultimately concludes the question is rhetorical. “Sorry, Bill. I’m sorry about that.”

“First night of the tour and you’re half an hour late to soundcheck. Thought you’d have come with Roger. What the hell happened? Do you have any idea what time it is? No—no, don’t go and look! Pete. This is time out of my schedule and everybody else’s. Look at me. Can I trust that the rest of the afternoon and evening is going to proceed smoothly?”

Pete furrows his brow, dumbfounded. “It’s a Who concert.”

“You know what I mean. As smoothly as the lot of you can manage. Well?”

“It’ll be fine, Bill. I apologize.”

“Good.” Bill leans in slightly and makes a face. “Christ, you smell like a locker room. Get cleaned up and come downstairs. I’ll have a cab waiting for you.”

“OK. Right. Thanks. Straightaway.”

Bill gives him one last dubious up-and-down for emphasis, and stalks back down the hall, shaking his head. Pete shuts the door, retrieves the phone from the floor, and hangs it back on its perch. He goes to do as he’s told.

In the lobby, as he passes through with his hands stuck solemnly in his pockets, teams of service workers parade by with carts of plates and glasses in tow, rattling down the faux marble tiles. A stern-looking woman dressed in black follows with a portable radio hanging off her waist, her arms filled with glittering streamers. They all pointedly ignore him, and proceed further into the body of the hotel, toward some appended ballroom or conference room that Pete assumes is being purposed for the after-party. His stomach becomes a yawning pit of apprehension, and then grumbles in protest from skipped breakfast.

Still bleary-eyed, he grabs a Coke from the vending machine before someone from the front desk steers him intently into a waiting cab. Curbishley’s orders, no doubt. He doesn’t even have to tell the cab driver to take him to the Summit.

The name of the venue strikes him as terribly ironic. As with the rest of Houston—or what little of the city he’s seen out the windows of taxi cabs and airport terminals—the Summit is perched on an expanse of manicured lawn and blacktop, perfectly level, circumscribed by a moat of street traffic and parking lot. The stadium itself is a Lego assemblage of concrete cubes, baked white under the November sunlight. As the cab peels off the highway, it swells up in the foreground like a brutalist sculpture.

They pull in at the back, sidling up to the parked tour buses and trailers. A handful of stray roadies are smoking in between trips to the freight elevators, their hands so blistered and stained that Pete can see the marks even through the window glass. One of them recognizes him, or at least makes an educated guess, and trots up to the door to open it as Pete stuffs a crumbled handful of American dollars in the driver’s palm. From that moment on, it’s too many pairs of eyes and hands on him, crews of people swarming like bees, shepherding him through doors with panic bars and herding him down wide linoleum hallways. He ventures a look down when he feels an object clipped to his belt, and glimpses a holographic laminate blinking up at him from a lanyard, stylized capital letters like a wide-mouth grin: “WHO TOUR 1975, ACCESS ALL AREAS.”

There’s something uncanny about that, even now. Stranger still the route from back lot to green room to a stage overlooking an empty arena, its overwhelming panorama as jarring as the endless stretches of Texan sprawl, lit up under the house lights so that he can see each and every one of the 18,000 seats. He remembers tripping down narrow staircases in basement clubs, superheated red-lit confines where you could see every face straight back to the wall. Gazing off the lip of the stage felt more like standing on a step than teetering on the edge of a cliff.

He used to carry his own gear, too, until his shoulders ached and his arms screamed in protest. Now, as he slinks through side-stage to join the band, Alan Rogan hands him off his gold top Les Paul with a jolly smile. It is emblazoned like a race car with a white vinyl “2.”

“Nice of you to join us,” whispers Alan, winking. Pete winks back at him, and slips the beast of a guitar across his chest.

“Pete!” cries Keith, first to spy his entrance from atop the drum riser. “How charitable of you to fuck everything up and take the heat off me for once.”

It’s a friendly jab, but Pete shrugs, wipes at his nose with the back of his hand. John’s stood off to Keith’s side with his arms crossed placidly over his bass, smiling tolerantly. Pete jams the quarter-inch into his guitar, electric hum through the Hiwatt and then silence, and chances to meet Roger’s eye, expecting quiet fury. What he sees instead reads more like concern.

Keith isn’t wrong, but Pete feels that this is a relatively insignificant fuck-up in a long history of fuck-ups, that the circumstances of his life have afforded him a seemingly inexhaustible supply. Nonetheless, they endure. He endures. He doesn’t want to take that for granted, which is part of why he’s quit drinking. One less simmering potential fuck-up to worry about. He’d rather be jet-lagged and disoriented at 11 in the morning than stone-drunk, wide-awake and fuming with impotent rage at the universe. It’s how he’s spent much of the past two years.

“Now then,” announces Curbishley, who has resumed his guardsman’s post beside the sound board with a nervous looking Bob Pridden. “Where were we?”

“Let’s try ‘Dreaming From The Waist,’” suggests Roger, clearing his throat, taking a swig from a thermos stacked on an amp head. The new ones are always the sticky ones. Even after a full circuit in the U.K., the band is still finding its way around the selections from _By Numbers_.

Keith collects them all with a rallying trio of kicks to the bass drum. He looks to Pete, Pete to Roger and then John. Pete strums the opening notes, a halting procession of chords, the song tentative in its opening bars, maybe even worrisome. It feels especially apt for this moment, first show of the first leg of an American tour. Tripping clumsily back into the swing of it. Then he raises his eyebrows, the neck of the guitar in signal. He brings it back down again in a slice, and they launch into a firestorm of melody.

_I feel like I wanna break out of the house_

_My heart is a-pumpin’, I’ve got sand in my mouth_

_I feel like I’m heading up to a cardiac arrest_

_I want to scream in the night, I want to manifest_

Roger embodies frustrated desire particularly well, Pete thinks. Even at rehearsals, soundcheck, he never holds back. Like he’s incapable of giving anything less than all. It sounds real, this expression of hot-blooded lust, clipped to the quick with racing thoughts, crazed and urgent and disorganized.

A bead of sweat forges at Pete’s temple, streaks down his cheek under the heat of the stage lights. He jogs up to the microphone to sing his backing vocal, its echoing refrain: _I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming._

_Of the day I can control myself._

John stops suddenly then, in the middle of one of those blazing sawtooth basslines, whipping Pete straight out of this weird moment of contemplation, stewing over the suggestions proposed by his own lyrics. The rest of them stammer to a halt.

“Need more of Pete in my monitor,” he says mildly, jerking a thumb toward the front of the stage.

“And you can turn John up, too,” adds Pete, not that he’s convinced it’s necessary, but he wants to sound useful. His voice seems tiny to him, dwarfed by the space of the Summit. He can feel Roger watching him, hovering with his arms crossed.

Pete doesn’t look back at him. He keeps his neck bent over the guitar, eyes on his boots. Too much to think about right now.

“Done and done,” says Pridden, diligently adjusting. “I think we’re sounding awfully good, here, gentlemen. Going to have a listen down front, but I’m liking the feel of this place.”

“You hear that, Bill?” squawks Keith, gesturing at him with a pointed drumstick before turning it back to indicate the band, mad professor waving a pointer at a classroom. “Off to a lovely start, aren’t we, boys. We’ll have earned all that champagne and cake tonight.”

Curbishley smirks at him, and his gaze drifts purposefully to Pete when he speaks. “’Earned’ is the operative term. Let’s get through tonight, first.”

“One more hour to run it through, and six until doors,” Roger pipes up, ever the pragmatist. “Think we can keep our heads on straight until then.”

“Easy for you to say,” quips Keith. “Yours didn’t get screwed on backwards.”

Pete finds some measure of relief in the lilt to Roger’s laugh. One more hour, then six. One night. Then nineteen more. A high-speed zig-zag pathway up the eastern seaboard, more arenas like this one filled to the brim with screaming kids. Back home in time for Christmas, supposedly, with the holidays abruptly preceded by another quick series of neighborhood gigs, not really gigs anymore but these massive spectacles, events demanding enormous teams of people and fanfare and afterparties. Three nights at the Hammersmith Odeon, and it’s another year gone by.

But for now, it’s best to focus on what’s straight ahead of him. It’s Roger, for some reason, approaching with a steaming Styrofoam cup in hand. Pete realizes he hasn’t been paying attention at all, that some indeterminate amount of time has passed again. It’s like being shaken awake from another dream. Keith and John are chatting animatedly. Curbishley and Pridden have skipped down many rows into the dizzying maw of seats, readying themselves beside the far mixing desk. They appear to be arguing with the in-house sound crew about something, but only halfheartedly so.

“You look like you could use a coffee,” says Roger. Affectless, but soft.

Pete stares down at him, accepts the cup suspiciously. He takes a sip. Burnt, and inundated with milk and sugar to render it palatable.

“It’s terrible,” he says through a wince.

Roger grins. “I know. Did the best I could with it.”

“It’ll do.”

“It’ll have to.”

“Oi, Ricky and Lucy,” Keith calls down at them, marked by a devilish smile that’s all bared teeth. He jerks his head out to where Bob is waving a thumbs up in the air like a lighthouse beam. “Ready to get back to it?”

Pete drains the rest of what’s in the cup and sets it down, eyes following Roger as he goes to wrench the microphone back out of the stand, test the gaff tape wrapped tight around the wire. Two firm pulls to be safe. Roger nods at him.

“Right, on we go,” says Pete with an exhale. He straightens his shoulders and fires a piercing glare out into the arena cavern, at nothing and everything at once. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”


	4. Chapter 4

_Later that evening_

“This must be the biggest dressing room in the biggest arena we’ve ever been in,” Pete hears Keith announce from behind him. “I love Texas. Everything’s bigger in Texas. Concert halls. Steak dinners.”

“Tits on the women,” says John thoughtfully.

Through the vanity mirror, Pete can see Keith sprawled out on his back on preposterously oversized couch, with John perched regally at one end, sipping at a glass of brandy. Despite the abundant real estate, Keith has positioned himself with his head nearly in John’s lap.

Once soundcheck had wrapped, the four of them had wandered their fragmented routes to dinner. John and Keith, eager to sample the local haute cuisine, have just now returned from what Pete assumes is the only white tablecloth joint in the vicinity either ignorant or ballsy enough to host them. Roger and Curbishley had opted for a more sensible neighborhood pub. They’d invited Pete along, too, but he’d opted to stay behind with Pridden and the rest of the road crew, picking at catering in lieu of a formal sit-down affair. He’s not sure he can stomach much more than cold cuts and warm cans of soda tonight.

It’s not nerves, per se. He doesn’t get stage fright. Never has. What gnaws at him is more indescribably existential in origin. He straightens the pin on his lapel, Meher Baba’s enigmatically smiling little black and white photograph. _Don’t worry,_ Baba seems to be suggesting. _Lighten up_.

His own reflection is unfamiliar to him, ensconced by a halo of smoldering lightbulbs. They exaggerate the emerging lines in his face, turn the color of his eyes an artificial shade of blue. He frowns at the slight but noticeable recession of his hairline.

“You look gorgeous, darling,” Keith says from the couch.

Pete glances at his watch. Thirty-five minutes until showtime now. He’s struck again by an urge to ramble about the labyrinth of unknown hallways, or maybe he’s just sick of looking at himself.

He tugs at the lapels of his suit jacket and smooths at his trouser legs, bright white so as to be visible even by the farthest-flung pairs of eyes in the upper seating decks. He turns to flash his compatriots a tight-lipped smile before slipping out the dressing room door into who-knows-where.

“You’re welcome,” Keith yells after him.

The walls of the corridor outside seem narrower than they are, glowing greenish-white under rows of recessed lighting and perfumed faintly with the smell of singed coffee. He follows the luminous pattern of exit signs, hung from the ceiling at strategic intervals. The sound of his boots echoes hollowly against the plastic flooring. If he pauses to listen, he can hear the low and steady thrum of the crowd, discernible even to his gradually failing ears, the dull vestiges of a roar finding its way through the building’s skeleton.

A cool draft of air skips over the skin of his hand. It is coming from where the exit signs are beckoning. He turns a corner to see a set of fire doors at the end of an adjoining passageway, decorated with perilous red-and-white warnings, one of them propped open by an object wedged between them on the floor. It looks to be Roger’s thermos.

He grins to himself like a lunatic, and then it’s as if his heart trips over the rhythm of its own frenzied beating. If Roger’s returned, it means their manager is prowling these same premises, and Pete has once again vanished from his post without cause or explanation. The scene before him also suggests that Roger has been taken by one of his inexplicable moods, and slunk off to be alone instead of joining the band for their pre-show libations.

He takes care to wipe the stupid expression off his face before creeping up to the emergency exit, wind whistling through the door frame. CAUTION, it warns him. DOOR IS ALARMED. The whole venue has been shouting at him in bold, high-contrast signage since his arrival. It occurs to him that if he were half as sharp as he’d like to believe himself to be, he’d take all this sensory barrage as a terrible portent, or at the very least some kind of novelistic metaphor worth heeding, and return to the dressing room to spend the rest of the evening confining his hands—when not occupied by a guitar—to the space between the backs of his thighs and a chair. He could, theoretically, stop getting himself into trouble, or at the very least ease off on tempting it. For a moment, he hesitates. The memory of the boat alarm comes flooding back from last night, its shrieking register and the strobing red light. Same red light as the exit signs.

_Yeah, right. Bullshit_. He gingerly plucks away the improvised doorstop, and wedges himself through. Holds his breath. No cataclysmic noise and fury, though the night air greets him with all the subtlety of a shockwave. Before he can get his hand around the knob, the draft pulls the door shut behind him with a startling slam. He cringes.

Roger, poised a few steps out under a streetlamp, turns immediately and glares at the intrusion. When he recognizes Pete, the hard edges to his scowl fall away. He seems more surprised than annoyed. He is not in his stage clothes quite yet, but still technically underdressed in a close-cropped t-shirt and patchwork jeans, now that the sun has gone down and a chill has seized hold over the city. He looks like a dancer under the spotlight in a parking lot stage, a cigarette hanging from his fingers.

“Pete,” he exhales. “Blimey. What are you—is it locked now? Can we get back through that way?”

Pete doesn’t hazard to check. “Suppose we’ll find out eventually.”

“Come calling for your pack of smokes, I take it?”

“Nicked some off John, actually. I’m well looked after in that department.”

Roger strolls up to him easily, looking up into Pete’s face like he’s checking for visible signs of damage. The car park, once empty, is now stacked to its periphery with rows upon rows of vehicles, fortressing itself into a tense quiet that is broken only by whips of wind and the dampened sound of nearby traffic.

Pete stuffs his hands into his pockets, rocks back on his heels. “Aren’t you cold?”

“Just needed a spot of fresh air.” Roger tilts his head at him. “Are you all right? Have you eaten something? You were looking a little green around the gills earlier.”

“I’m good, Roger, I’m perfectly fine.”

They stare at each other, caught in a halfway space between standoffish and amicable. Pete has been pondering the nature of this magnetism for years, the ways in which they simultaneously attract and repel one another, though he suspects Roger agonizes over the situation more than he does. It’s not like the two of them have ever got on. A traditional friendship was never in the cards. Pete nonetheless maintains what he can only describe as a ferocious interest—some weird, unconscious, animal attraction—and has slowly resigned himself to the mystery of that, that what they have simply transcends description. Or logic and reason, for that matter.

He’s been unfair to Roger because of it, clumsily lashing out just to see where the boundaries lie, trying to make sense of the absurdity. It would be easier—had been easier—to write Roger off, diminish what he feels for him by likewise diminishing the man himself, reducing him to the caricature of a snarling south London tough guy he’d built up in the sixties, when they were both younger and angrier. They had much more to prove back then.

He had assumed they would always be that way, scrapping with one another and scraping by. He’s been right on some things and wrong on others. Now they are standing in back of a hulking arena in America’s glistening pastures, the land of plenty and opportunity. They are, for the first time, making real money—eye-watering sums of it, the kind that requires lawyers and advisors to manage. Rock ‘n’ roll magazines designate him as pop’s pre-eminent philosopher and approach him with the wide-eyed reverence of religious acolytes. It’s probably why he’s felt too comfortable running his mouth off at them.

And he and Roger still butt heads, of course. It’s almost a relief. But Roger has changed over the years; he is gentler now, and more secure in letting other people see it. When he isn’t gentle, it’s only because he cares a little too deeply about the band for his own good.

Pete would like to change, too. The guilt nags him during his better moments. He’s been having more of those, he hopes, in recent months.

“Are _we_ all right?” Pete asks him suddenly, possibly ill-advised, but that’s nothing new. “Are you cross with me?”

Roger looks nearly offended. “What? No! Why?”

“I was wondering why you hadn’t knocked this morning. Woken me. I mean, usually, you and I, we share a car—”

“Christ, Pete—”

“—to the venue. Keith and John, and you and me. It’s just how we’ve always done it.” Pete laughs tunelessly. “Even when you’ve wanted to knock the piss out of me!”

Roger makes a noise of frustration and digs the heel of his hand into his temple, wisps of smoke curling round his head. “That’s what this is about? I tried! Heaven’s sake, I tried. You didn’t answer. What, was I supposed to break the door down? I can’t—can’t be spending every moment of the tour chasing after you. Or wondering if what I’ve said or done is going to set you off. I worry enough about you as it is. More so now that you’re not drinking, which is _insanity_ , I realize, but it’s like you’ve been lost in space or something—”

“You _worry_ about me,” Pete says, gleefully, dragging out the enunciation of that word.

“Fuck me, why do I— _yes_ , I worry about you, ‘course I do. I never know with you.” Roger takes a long pull off the cigarette, scowling. He crosses his arms, feet apart, standing stern and proud in the way that he does to compensate when he’s actually quite nervous. It’s charming to watch. Pete feels that impish grin creeping back on to his face.

“I wish you wouldn’t look at me like that,” Roger tells him, and his shoulders sag with a heavy sigh as he turns away, out toward the darkened, indistinct geometry of the nearby street.

“Why not?”

“Don’t play stupid.”

A gust of wind slashes through the parking lot again. Somewhere out in the distance, a car alarm starts to wail. Pete’s grin wilts into a wistful smile. He eases apologetically up to Roger’s side.

“You know,” Pete says, after a beat, “He could have sent anyone to go and fetch me. I think he wanted the satisfaction of catching me off guard.”

“He’s a good manager. He’s good for us.”

“Yes. He is. You were right about him. You’ve been known to be right from time to time.”

Roger peers up at him slyly at that, but the impression of it is playful. Pete wishes Roger would beam at him the way he occasionally does, that thousand-megawatt crinkled-round-the-eyes gut punch of a smile, but he supposes he hasn’t earned that this evening. Not yet, anyway. He’s giving it a good effort.

“I told you I’d be behind you, whatever you decided was right,” Pete continues. “I meant that. You did get my letter, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Roger says, so quiet it’s almost inaudible.

“Well I’m happy you don’t have it out for me still. You never wrote me back.”

“I’ve never _had it out_ for you.”

“Oh, come on.”

“You’ve got it fucking backwards, is what.”

“I’ve certainly had _something_ for you,” Pete mumbles, before he can catch himself. “Been trying to figure out what that is for a good long time.”

Roger’s gaze falls quickly to his feet and he shivers, presumably from the cold. “Yeah. Me too.”

A silvery spike of adrenaline courses up Pete’s spine. He is only superficially aware of the scene contained in the building behind them, massive fucking pit full of people, somewhere an imaginary clock ticking backwards. He knows what awaits him there. This ocean of pavement is uncharted waters by comparison. There is a whole other realm of possibilities standing right next to him. He suppresses a shiver himself. Definitely not from the cold.

“I didn’t want to say the wrong thing,” Roger says abruptly, still staring at the ground, flicking a spot of ash off his jeans.

Pete cocks his head in silent question. Roger seems to sense it, and after a long pause, turns his face back up to his. Even cast in shadow, beyond the reach of the street lamp, there is a blistering earnest visible across it.

“I don’t have a way with words like you do.”

It’s not so much a lamentation as a statement of fact. Characteristically blunt, as though he were commenting on the weather. But then something seems to cave within him, buckle underneath an invisible weight.

“I just thought you _knew_ , that you—always knew. Fuck’s sake, you could try to kill me. I think you probably have.” What comes out of him is a choked clip of a laugh, and then he shakes his head, as if marveling at his own surrender. “I’ve forgiven worse than your big mouth. I can never stay angry with you. I couldn’t even if I wanted to.”

Pete keeps his eyes fastened on him, his mind buzzing. He waits for the defensive tactics, for Roger to shrink away or flee.

He doesn’t. The lure proves too much, the tension impossible to bear. Pete feels himself overcome by a terrible inertia and grasps Roger by his forearm, dragging them together hard enough that they almost trip over each other’s boots. He kisses Roger rough and haphazard, more brazen than lustful, though he feels that, too; silvery substance in his veins going from metallic to red-hot. He tastes the bitterness of smoke and black tea, sweet sting of lemon.

Roger’s other hand comes to his shoulder, squeezing hard but not pulling in, not pushing them apart. The pressure lasts for fleeting seconds, and then Pete is stumbling backwards, flung off and teetering from the force of it, shoved away with the searing stripe of a cigarette burn at the inside of his wrist.

“Are you out of your _fucking_ mind,” Roger accuses, breathless and hoarse, in a barbed wire voice. His eyes are alight with something akin to panic.

Pete licks his lower lip, steadying himself with his hands at his knees. He’s been getting that question a lot lately. He growls and says nothing, staring helplessly at Roger like a feral creature, clutching instinctively at the burn.

“What have you done?” Roger takes notice of the extinguished cigarette in his hand and flings it away, exasperated. When he speaks again, there’s no longer a serrated edge to it. The words trail away as he comes back to Pete, almost mournful, taking his injured wrist in his grasp, examining the burn with a betraying tenderness. “Pete, you fool. You stupid bloody idiot. Why would you…”

Pete sways into him slightly, and it’s almost like being drunk, familiar swimming in his skull, the sensation of Roger’s fingers on his skin. Roger allows it but stills him with a stern hand at the curve of his jaw, cupping his face. Pete resists the urge to kiss him again, figures he’s risking a beating that way anyway. He’s gone far enough for one night.

Roger jerks his head suddenly, arms falling to his sides. Pete misses the contact with a profound longing.

The fire door opens, and there’s John standing in the hallway, squinting out into the dark at them and frowning. It’s unusual to see him anything short of benignly unconcerned, but it’s clear he’s come on a mission.

“Shit. There you are. This is where you’ve decided to run off to? The both of you?” John props the door open with his foot, throwing his hands up. “We’re on in fifteen, you realize.” He gestures dismissively at Pete, and addresses Roger. “Him I expect it from, but you?”

“Sorry,” mumbles Roger, scratching sheepishly at his neck.

“ _You_ , go get dressed. Or… undressed, as the case may be.” John sighs, turning to glower at Pete. “ _You_ are going to give our management a heart attack. Get your ass back in here.”

“Sir, yes sir,” chimes Pete brightly, stuffing his hands back in his pockets and feeling about as half-witted as everyone else seems to be suggesting he is.

“Thin ice, Townshend,” warns John, but he doesn’t mean it.

Pete watches Roger shuffle back inside first, ducking under John’s elbow and retreating into the little rectangle of greenish light. He waits until he can’t see Roger anymore before he follows. John blocks him with an arm against the door, braced up across Pete’s chest.

Pete raises his eyebrows at him. “Perhaps I misunderstood my orders, but I’m told we have a show to play. In fifteen minutes.”

“What did you say to him?”

Pete goes practically shrill, shoulders scrunched up defensively. “Nothing! I didn’t do anything! Why does everyone think I’m out to—”

“I saw his face, Pete.” John narrows his eyes into an unusually penetrating stare. Pete experiences the momentary terror of being seen through entirely, but brushes it off. “Try and get along for once, will you? Try not to fuck this up.”

“I am trying,” says Pete, honestly.

“Lovely. Glad to hear it.” John steps aside and sweeps out an accommodating arm. “After you.”

Pete slinks in with his tail between his legs, teeth gritted, eyes adjusting to the harsh glare. As he strides back into the belly of the beast, he repeats John’s admonishment in his head like a mantra. _Try not to fuck this up_. He dwells on it until the phrase turns fuzzy and warped like snow on a television screen. He lingers, too, on the faint impression of Roger’s fingers at his collarbone, how they’d crushed into him, then gone gentle round the skin of his arm.

It’s onward now, ever onward into the abyss. He moves with the deliberation of a soldier, all functions on autopilot. The four of them—Pete, Roger, Keith, and John—cluster shortly in the stairwell at the side of the stage, lined up and silent in anticipation, flanked by stagehands, roadies, engineers, photographers. When Pete is at last ushered back out in full view, guitar thrown back on to him and hanging at his hip like a deadly weapon, the noise in his head filters magically away. What he hears in its place is a deafening roar coming out at him from all sides. The sight before him is an endless blur of stirring figures, alternately illuminated in bright colors and then eclipsed by shadow.

It’s all crystalizing now, becoming terrifically real. The hard edges of the amplifiers and equipment and gear, the outlines of his bandmates in granular detail.

The lights overhead come up, lighting the petrol in his blood. The band erupts, and the audience responds in kind, a paired explosion to the slashing power chords of “Substitute.”

Pete plays like a demon, hurling himself across the stage like a demented marionette and possessed by masochistic fury. There is paradoxical comfort to this, losing himself to the propulsive rage and joy of a crowd. He hates them sometimes, but they’ve steered him unerringly into what he knows he’s meant to be.

He’s meant to be _this_. To be here, after all. He can deny it all he likes and lord knows he’s tried.

He raises his arm and brings it down in a brutal windmill, feeling his nailbeds ripping open, his fingers christened with blood. The population of the Houston Summit bellows in approval.

He focuses, instead, on the dull throb of the cigarette burn, scraping against the lining of his jacket.

It is preciously hidden and insistently painful.

Insistently hidden, and preciously painful.


	5. Chapter 5

_Later still..._

As ever, and of his own doing, Pete finds himself surrounded by people, and utterly alone.

He slouches against the wall of the windowless ballroom. There is an ominous incongruity to its current state, adorned with folding tables and containers of booze, metallic balloons clotting in ceiling corners. Flashy rock star accoutrements against the sensible wallpaper and crown molding. The threat of a novel brand of debauchery, the kind that the band has all but trademarked, looms over a modest history of conferences, weddings, and bar mitzvahs.

No furniture and pantyhose flying yet, but the night is young. Pete watches as the rock stars themselves flit amongst their friends and staff, glasses of champagne and cognac in hand, brandishing celebratory smiles. Keith’s a prowling tycoon in a white three-piece suit, parading around with his magnanimous theatrics, clapping everyone on the shoulder as if the band were his business venture and they’ve all got done closing the deal of the century. He returns always to John, hanging off their bassist like a feather boa. John himself is subdued and diabolical and forever complicit.

In the negative spaces knit within groups of bodies, in the crook of an elbow or over a shoulder, Pete will occasionally catch a glimpse of Roger as he makes the rounds. It’s the glint of golden hair or the sound of laughter that draws his eye before he looks away.

The night had gone well. It had been a good show after all. And they had not shared a car back to the hotel.

Pete scrubs a hand up and down his face. It makes no sense to linger down here, torturing himself. He’s riding the downswing of the post-show adrenaline rush like an amphetamine crash, and his mood is commensurately unpleasant. There’s the anesthetic warmth of a foreign bed awaiting upstairs, and he’d nearly collapsed back into it earlier after showering off the sweat and stage grit.

But he had dutifully dressed instead, and come back down to feign in the revelry. Circled round the room with his glass full of Coke, exchanging the necessary handshakes and bear hugs, nodding with empty laughter at the same old anecdotes and inside jokes. Even Curbishley, for all his admonishments earlier in the day, had seemed happy to see him there.

He clinks the ice around in his glass. Across the room, a drooping banner, lazily pinned above the dance floor, reads: SQUEEZE BOX.

_And when daddy comes home,_

_He never gets no rest._

If he’s being honest, he is hesitant to formally tie up the evening while Roger is still refusing to make eye contact. As he wracks himself over how to repair the damage, Keith catches sight of him and zeroes in, a missile seeking out its target. Gone is the eternally present glass of brandy; he now has a plate in hand with a generous slice of cake, a fork with a speared piece in the other.

“Pete,” he says rapturously, “It’s positively divine. You must try this.”

Pete opens his mouth to protest and has the cake shoved into it instead, which he might have expected. He chews through stale mouthfuls of sugar, and washes it down with another sickeningly sweet gulp of Coke.

He says, diplomatically, “I think it’s been sitting out for a while.”

“Nonsense, dear boy. The festivities are just beginning.”

Keith is allergic to displays of public misery which are not his own, and Pete has thus presented himself as a problem to be solved. Keith wags the plastic fork at him, and then scarfs down a few more bites in rapid succession, joining Pete at his side. They stare out at the mingling throngs of people.

“Am I importuning you?” Keith asks him, after several moments, with a tone that implies he doesn’t care one way or the other about the answer.

Pete snorts. A genuine smile teases at the corner of his mouth.

“No, Keith, not at all. Never in your life.”

“Splendid. Do you know why this cake tastes so impossibly delicious?”

“Enlighten me.”

Keith actually spares an immediate retort to finish chewing. He wags the fork again, eyebrows knitted in serious consideration.

“You see, this cake is a reward, procured specifically for us—that is, The Who, naturally, and their many friends—much like this beautiful and quaint little afterparty, in a posh ballroom, in a posh hotel, in which we happen to have the luxury of staying, amongst our dearest associates and beautiful women and fine varieties of liquor, at undoubtedly no small expense.”

Pete looks over at him with a raised eyebrow. Keith continues to survey his domain.

“This cake, in other words, is our bonus for playing three hours of the world’s greatest rock and roll music for thousands of people, for thousands of pounds in compensation.” He pauses for effect. “To be perfectly frank I would have happily become a rock star free of charge. Might do just for the cake, even.”

“Mm. Man cannot survive on cake alone.”

“A common misconception.”

“In our case it’s an added perk.”

“You might say that this cake is, in fact, icing on the cake.”

“I might. I might say that I don’t generally care for dessert and that I’m not very good at pretending to be a rock star.”

“There are far worse things to pretend to be.”

Pete swallows. A small gathering of people disperses on the ballroom floor, and as they depart Roger appears in full view, chatting politely with a very pretty American fan who is almost as slight-statured as he is. It’s too loud and too far away to hear what they’re saying, but the body language is unmistakable. An unseemly prick of jealousy wheedles Pete just under the ribs. He chases down the rest of his drink on impulse, forgetting there’s no alcohol in it.

“You’ve got competition, it seems,” says Keith.

Pete chokes and coughs into his glass. “What?”

“That brunette girl,” Keith clarifies. His eyes are wildfire. “I know you. She’s precisely your type.”

“Right,” Pete mutters. “Sadly, Roger’s got the jump on me there.”

“You could go talk to him.”

It’s a preposterous idea. Pete screws his face up accordingly. “Why the hell would I do that?”

Keith shrugs, and jabs the fork upright in the remaining wedge of cake. He hands the plate off to Pete, who obliges, and he then dabs at his face with a handkerchief produced from the inside of his suit jacket. “Last I saw John, he was chatting up some bird I had my eye on. I intend to go ingratiate myself.”

Pete blinks a few times in dim surprise. “And how do you anticipate that working out for you?”

“I imagine he’ll let me join them,” says Keith, with casual certainty. He wipes his hands, stuffs the used handkerchief in Pete’s shirt pocket, and then pats him affectionately on the cheek. He is wearing snakeskin platform boots that put them at nearly the same height, and as such he can project a level gaze at Pete, suggestive and unusually cryptic, which he holds as he backs away from the wall and toward the waiting partygoers.

He spreads his arms wide and declares, “No rules in rock and roll!”

Then he turns, and threads himself once more within the chattering crowd.

Pete sighs. He contemplates Keith’s pep talk with the plate of cake in his hands, staring ruefully at crumbs and white frosting, cheerful sticky contrast against his scabbed and dirty fingers. No matter how hard he scrubs, he can never quite get the guitar string tarnish out from underneath the callouses. In this line of work, certain stains are permanent.

The burn on his wrist has scabbed over, too, but the skin around it is still pink and tender. His eyes wander back to the SQUEEZE BOX banner, a crooked halo suspended over the noise and likely destined to fall. There are peals of laughter erupting from the room now, the abrupt and heady kind with salacious implications. Cheeks are growing ruddy and the temperature of the room is warming. Soon there will be pools of fabric framing peeks of skin, the ritualized shedding of clothes and inhibitions, and the night will have tipped over into the same old dominion of inevitabilities.

_Squeeze me, come on and squeeze me_

_Come on and tease me like you do_

_I’m so in love with--_

Pete barks a bitter laugh and pitches both the plate and his glass, indiscriminate, into a nearby rubbish bin. He decides he has nothing to lose for the remainder of the night, and follows Keith’s example to immerse himself back into the fray.

As he shoulders by, a young woman turns to him, grasping him by the wrist in recognition. Pete resists a wince at the spark of pain. She smiles up at him, fey and beautiful and nervy with champagne. He may be delirious, hallucinating from exhaustion and reading arcane things into flirtatious glances, but he swears there is something clairvoyant to her, that in her gaze she has captured him and in that same moment torn him down, blown off the fraudulent posturing and pretense which he’s built into a fortress.

Pete feels somehow comforted by this, the enormity of being exposed for all his naked simplicity.

Keith had been right. She is definitely his type.

He returns the smile, though no invitation lurks behind it. Her face is kind, playful, and she releases him, turning back to her group of friends. Pete runs his fingers absently over the scab.

He scans the ballroom, but Roger is already gone.

***

Pete returns to his room when he discovers his sense of time has, once again, become unmoored. It is both earlier and later than expected when he teeters out of the lift, into the dead silence of the hallway. His watch, which he has not yet adjusted, informs him that it is 7:00 in the morning. He has to run the conversion in his head from London to Houston time.

He turns the key in the latch, opens the door, and immediately steps on something that has been shoved just under the threshold.

Puzzled, he holds up his foot. Lying in the foyer is a crisp little envelope, though less so now that he’s just trampled over it.

He stands on one leg for several dumbstruck seconds. At last, feeling foolish, he leans over to pick it up. It’s small, but the paper has the heft and richness of fancy hotel stationery. He turns it over in his hands. There is nothing written on the outside of it.

He drifts a few paces inside, quietly mesmerized, and kicks the door shut with the heel of his boot. He opens the envelope, which has not been sealed, and withdraws a single folded sheet of paper, ripped from one of those bedside notepads.

He chuckles to himself. It’s a very nice envelope, and shitty paper.

Unfolding it, he reads at the top of the page, in Roger’s handwriting:

_Dear Pete,_

His stomach does something funny. He folds the paper back up and goes and sits at the edge of the bed. After a minute, he takes a deep breath, and unfolds it again.

He reads.

_Dear Pete,_

_Sorry I never wrote you back. I meant what I said tonight. I always do._

_Consider this my formal response, if you like._

_I don’t care if we’re friends, so long as we need each other._

_-R_

Pete stares down at the note with his heart pounding relentlessly in his chest. Despite his raging pulse, he feels himself enveloped by an unnatural calm. He reads the note again, and then again. Runs his eyes over the words until they stop making sense, until the letters comprising them mutate into meaningless hieroglyphs.

He stands and shoves the note and his key into the back pocket of his jeans. Possessed by an iron resolve, the blood surging in his ears, he marches straight back out into the hallway, traveling down to the other side of the hotel floor with singular and unwavering purpose.

He thinks he has the room number right. He’s been memorizing them since California, just in case. Ordinarily he’d feel a bit pathetic about that, but not now. Not tonight.

He bangs on the door. It’s a shade too urgent, maybe, too loud. He looks frantically about, up and down the hall, and then bangs again.

It swings open as he’s hammering away, and when he sees Roger, stood there right in front of him with bare feet planted and a hand on his hips, that benevolent worry scrawled over his face and his eyes too earnest, Pete’s breath seizes in his throat.

He had anticipated everything up to this moment. Now, his mind is blank, woefully unprepared.

A terrifying silence drags by. He watches the television flashing mute over Roger’s shoulder. There is a wine bottle beside it, and an empty glass.

“Did I wake you?” Pete manages. His voice nearly creaks. His mouth is dry.

“No,” says Roger, softly.

“Can I come in?”

Roger torments him for an elongated moment, staring, but at least he’ll meet his eye. Pete feels the space between them crackling with lightning, and the space in his chest caving under an aching nostalgia.

“Yeah,” he replies, with dawning understanding. “All right.”

Roger backs gingerly away, and he seems to grasp that there’s no use trying for nonchalance now, that when Pete crosses over into the room and closes the door behind them that a metaphorical boundary has also been breached.

His gaze doesn’t falter when Pete comes to him, slowly, as if approaching a wild animal. Pete brings his hands to Roger’s face. Roger releases a shuddering breath.

“Tell me to stop,” Pete says. He brings their foreheads together, and feels fingers curling round the belt loops at his hips, feels like trepidation about to give way. His eyes are slipping to Roger’s mouth as he speaks, the temptation of them dangerously close. “Tell me to leave and I’ll go. I won’t trouble you any longer, we needn’t speak of it. We can—we can go back to—”

“Back to what?” Roger breathes a helpless laugh. There’s something sad about it. “There was never any going back.”

“No,” Pete concedes in a low voice. “No, I suppose not.”

“You’re not drunk,” observes Roger.

“I’m not,” says Pete. He tries for a smile. “You are. A little. You’re stalling.”

“I’m thinking,” Roger corrects, licking his lips. He pulls, and they sway backwards. Pete steadies them, a palm coming to the small of Roger’s back, the other braced out against the wall as he is navigated against it. Pete laughs nervously, humorlessly.

“Are you? Well, then. I’d hate to interrupt.”

“I’ve been trying to figure this out.”

“This?”

“Us. Well, you, mostly.”

“Haven’t had much luck there myself, I’m afraid.”

Roger’s pulls again, dragging their hips together, brushing Pete’s erection against his hip. Pete curses under his breath.

“You stare too much,” accuses Roger, sweet with wine, through a half-smile. “All the time. At me.”

“Yeah,” Pete admits, dumbly.

“You’re always—you _start_ these things. It’s your fault.”

“I do. It is.”

“Why? Tell me.”

Pete looks down at him, overwhelmed by the scope of this question, its apocalyptic considerations, and struck useless by how terribly he longs to crush their mouths together again. He fears the desperation will burn him up and scatter him to ash all over the carpet.

“It’s because it’s not real, is it?” Roger laughs wistfully, acidly. “Now who’s stalling.”

Pete kisses him.

It’s hardly the same as the first time—hesitant, spiraling into frenzy, in a hotel room etched into his memory—or the second, more like a dare than a kiss, Pete’s frayed nerves and hair-trigger impulse pushed to its breaking point. With Roger shoved up against the wall, Pete kisses him with a force and deliberation that borders on cruelty. Pete would even worry about hurting him, if he didn’t think they were evenly matched, measure for brutal measure.

Roger makes a sound that Pete also resolves to remember forever, a sound that escapes when his mouth falls open in resignation and Pete pushes his tongue inside. The taste of wine feels like stealing, the scrape of Roger’s teeth on his lip like striking flint.

Roger’s hand comes to the base of Pete’s skull, threading into his hair, grasping hard enough to withdraw exhilarating wisps of pain.

Pete breaks away for air, gasping, only just now aware from the searing in his chest that he hasn’t been breathing. Roger arches into him, under him, grinding into his pelvis while pulling at his neck, and Pete has to buttress himself against the wall with his forearm and a bent knee. It hurts—every point of contact hurts—but the ache of his joints against the drywall is nothing compared to the shocks of pleasure where Roger pushes them together through their jeans.

Pete bites his lip to stifle a noise that he’s certain would be, even now, despite the circumstances, intolerably undignified. Roger’s eyes are fiery, puckish in a way that Pete has never seen before. It could frighten him, if he were to think about it for too long.

He doesn’t get a chance to. He feels Roger’s hands at his shoulders, pushing, and for a horrible moment he’s shot through with despair, flashing recollection of the car park and Roger burning him—literally, too—the fear that he’s being pushed away again.

But then he’s the one with his back to the wall. Roger thrusts him up against it, roughly. His face has darkened with determination. It’s an expression Pete is more accustomed to seeing on him, but there’s a provocative undercurrent to it that starts Pete’s heart jackhammering against his ribs.

His confusion must be evident. Roger cedes him an odd smile, whisked away as quickly as it comes, and says, “Just stay there, all right?”

Pete’s head is a raging sea, a storm of incoherent thoughts. His cock is unbearably hard in his jeans. All he can manage is a short nod. All he can focus on is the damp shine on Roger’s lower lip.

“All right,” he agrees, a notch above a whisper.

The sight of Roger sinking to his knees in front of him is so bizarre and unprecedented that at first he fails to acknowledge it as real. He expects to jolt awake, roused from a dream by alarm bells and fanfare or someone banging down a door.

But then Roger is undoing his belt, pulling buttons loose from his fly, wrenching the pair of waistbands down and below his hips. Doesn’t even flinch at Pete springing out of his briefs, the urgent obscenity of it. Pete has never felt embarrassed by his own arousal before, but he figures there’s a first time for everything. This night is a spinning roulette wheel of first times.

Roger looks up once at him, out of mischief or impudence or even vengefulness Pete is unable to tell, and then his mouth slips around the head of Pete’s cock, his hand curling at the base of him, and the storm in Pete’s head doesn’t quiet so much as vanish entirely, blinked out in a single, devastating flash.

Pete’s head drops back against the wall and his eyes fall closed, mostly out of self-preservation. He’s worried that if he looks down, fully appraises what’s happening, Roger will either stop to torment him or he’ll come instantaneously. Both possibilities seem ruinous.

This, _this_ is nearly ruinous. The euphoria and incomprehensibility of it all. Roger sucking him off—which he’s thought about, obviously, envisioned during long showers or late nights in hotel beds in a great many variable and detailed scenarios—but never once believed would actually _happen_ , all their tremendous sexual gravity be damned. He also knows that Roger has never done this before, because no, _no_ , absolutely not, Roger _wouldn’t_ , he’s not like that, and then the understanding that yes, in fact, he is, _right now_ , and that Pete is the first, or better, the _only_ —

It almost undoes him. Instinctively, Pete’s hand finds the back of Roger’s head, not really to guide him but rather to slow him down. Roger pulls away, glancing up with his eyes like venomous quills, and Pete is too desperate to even feel ashamed of the groan of complaint this elicits.

“Don’t,” Roger scolds. His hands hook themselves into the slack of Pete’s belt, now slipped halfway down his backside, in warning. Pete nods rapidly, flattens both palms obediently against the wall. He thinks he sees Roger smile a little at that.

“Then don’t you dare fucking stop,” Pete tells him, low and fraught and with the words tangling up into one another.

“You could ask nicely.”

“Fucking god in heaven, do not make me beg. Please. God damn it, Roger, I swear—"

Roger, definitively, smiles. With a brisk roll of his shoulders, he says, “Close enough,” and brings his head back down, takes Pete back into his mouth, and this time Pete can’t help crying out, his hands flying involuntarily to where Roger’s have settled below his hips. His fists clench around Roger’s wrists.

Roger doesn’t protest this, at least. To the extent that Pete can salvage any type of coherent thought out of the scorched remains of his composure, he decides that their singer is, as with many of his unexpected and emergent talents over the years, an unusually quick study at the art of blowjobs. Imagine that.

Roger pries one of his arms from Pete’s grip. Pete dares to look down, watching in admiration as Roger finally allows himself some effort at his own relief, working a hand into his waistband, pulling and twisting steadily, up and down.

It breaks the rhythm just enough, and Pete, torturously close, begins bucking his hips to compensate, thrusting into Roger’s throat. Roger, bless him, takes it in stride. He wrests his other hand free, steadies Pete’s delirious rocking with a palm pushed up against his pelvis, and then, with self-assured finality, wraps his fingers back around and drags them up Pete’s length.

It’s that, and the flat of Roger’s tongue at the underside of his cock, brushing up in a hot velvet stripe, that does Pete in. He comes with a white heat unfurling from his belly, and a drawn-out groan. His head knocks back against the wall. He glimpses stars behind his eyelids.

Through the rush of blood in his ears, and the ebb of his orgasm, he hears Roger coughing, spitting, and Pete won’t begrudge him that, assumes it must be one hell of an acquired taste. He listens, eyes fastened on the pockmarked ceiling, to the rustling sounds of Roger finishing himself in his jeans. He might have offered to return the favor, but something tells him that if he dares to voice the urge, ventures even to touch him, Roger will bristle again. Bristle and run.

Pete musters the nerve to glance back down again just as Roger comes over his hand in a few brief tugs, his own eyes clamped shut, in concentration or to keep out the sight of everything they’ve done.

Pete shifts his weight back and forth on his feet. The hotel suite feels tilted, dislodged off its axis.

Roger’s lips twitch in a grimace as he shakes off his hand, then eases himself against the wall beside Pete’s wobbling legs. He drapes his arms over his knees, folding himself around the rapid rise and fall of his chest, his eyes glazed over and faraway. He stares out at the opposite wall, catching his breath.

Pete sinks down slowly, hitching up his belt. He lands next to Roger with a thump.

He almost asks Roger if he’s all right, but swallows the words as they reach his lips. It’s a question too thin to wrap itself around what has happened, flimsy enough to be meaningless. He thinks he knows the answer anyway.

Through the electrical hum of the muted television, and the low hiss of the radiator, he listens to their breathing, slowing in tandem.

Finally, Roger rolls his head against the wall to look at him. Pete does the same. A strange pair of thoughts seize hold as their eyes meet. He remembers, years ago, a girl at the pub after one of their weekly gigs at the Goldhawk, telling them that he and Roger’s eyes were the same color blue. ( _No_ , he’d thought at the time, with the certainty that had come from habitual observation. _Roger’s are darker_.) And then, the realization that where words have always failed them—conversations veering off course, negotiations turning to bitter arguments, their eternal slippery slope from communication to cruelty—this, the taut line of their connected gazes, the physicality of proximity, has always been faithful. They are able to choreograph themselves within glances, intuit whole languages from halting gestures.

Maybe that’s why Roger could forgive the deadly blows and deadlier words but seems to crumble under the weight of Pete staring at him. The flinching backwards and folding under and awkward fumbling—the fucking, Christ, the locomotive force of that—explained by some brute, primeval honesty, impossible to understand and likewise to resist.

Subconsciously, effortlessly, they _are_ speaking to one another and making an undeniable sort of sense. It is in a place deep down, well beyond reach.

Yes, Pete muses. Roger’s eyes are darker. Just slightly. He reaches out and cups his hand around Roger’s neck, at the curve of his jaw. He does it without thought, brushing a thumb out to trace the angle there, then across the plane of Roger’s face, pressing up until it sinks against the rise of his cheekbone and pushes a possessive dimple in the flesh beneath it.

What comes out of Roger is like the opposite of a gasp, a jagged rush of air that reveals he had been holding his breath. His face collapses, a rainbow of expressions too quick to read, but the last one, clear as day, before he vaults to his feet, is fear.

Roger barrels across the room like a storm cloud, without looking back. He goes into the bathroom, flicks on the light, and slams the door.

Pete rolls his head back against the wall, squeezing his eyes shut against the ceiling. He suppresses a groan.

“Ro- _gerrr_ ,” he calls, unable to extinguish the base note of frustration.

No answer.

He rises from the floor, unwieldy, adjusting himself and buttoning his jeans, buckling his belt with a lingering sense of otherworldly detachment. Exhaustion and confusion compete for residency in his head.

He lumbers over to the bathroom, leaning up against its frame, his temple touched to the white painted wood of the door. He listens through it. Silence.

“Rog’,” he says again.

“Fuck off,” snaps Roger.

Pete squeezes his eyes shut once more, so hard it’s painful.

“I’m sorry,” he says, urgent like a prayer, like a soldier in a foxhole. “I don’t even know what I’m apologizing for, but I’m sorry. Honestly. I don’t know what I’ve done. I thought that… _Roger_. Please tell me. Please open the door.”

“Go _away_ , Pete.”

Pete bangs his head against the door. It’s harder, and louder, than he had intended. “That letter was an engraved _fucking_ invitation.”

“Yeah, well you should have burned it,” comes the agonized reply.

That stings an awful lot more than he’d like. Pete runs his hand over his back pocket, the folded outline of the piece of paper.

“I didn’t. I won’t.”

Silence again. It lasts a small eternity.

“Do you regret it, is that it?” Pete senses the edge creeping back into his voice, the familiar souring that threatens all their attempts at this, at simply _talking_ to each other. “Right. Didn’t take long. You’re awfully quick to turn around on me. Can’t ever tell what you want! Can hardly keep up with your moods, you capricious little _ff_ —”

“That is fucking rich, coming from you!”

“—and I _didn’t_ start this, for once. Not this time! If you hadn’t, if you—you _knew_ , sticking this shit under my door, you _knew_ it would—”

“Have you gone mad? Are you hearing yourself? You didn’t start this? The hell went on in the fucking—in the car park, then? What do you call that?”

“ _A stupid idea!_ ” Pete shouts into the door, as loud as might convey the magnitude of this admission. It is followed by a manic burst of laughter, and then a frantic, escalating accounting, punching out of him with the crazed relief of a convict rattling off the list of his crimes. “A stupid, terrible idea, the worst I’ve ever had in my life, short of that night in San Francisco, the one where Keith nearly died and I downed half a bottle of brandy, and, I—I, in my infinite _fucking_ wisdom, thought it a bloody fine opportunity to kiss you! Fucking downhill from there, eh!”

Pete kicks the door viciously with his boot, scuffing a dark smudge into the paint. He curses quietly, and then again, more forcefully, letting them spill out of him in a furious waterfall. He storms away from the bathroom, pacing, and then back to it again, waiting and half hoping for Roger, fed up at last, to burst through and lay into him.

Roger doesn’t emerge. Roger doesn’t say a word, in fact. The emptiness is awful. Pete would rather be staggering out and back down the hallway with a bloody nose.

It had always been easier. But they don’t hit one another anymore.

Somehow, this is worse.

He takes a deep, gulping breath, overcome as quickly with guilt as he had been by rage. He waits for his heart to quit racing, and when the surge of anxiety and indignation retreats like the tide, he leans his forehead back against the bathroom door. His palm rests beside it, too, in a silent plea that Roger will never witness. He tries to will it through the barrier between them.

“I don’t regret it,” he says, steadily now. “Maybe I ought to. Maybe you’re right, and I have gone mad. Maybe _you_ regret it. But I don’t. Never have, not for a moment. And I’m not sorry, I ain’t sorry about that part.”

He tries to stop himself there, but what pours out of him is like a dam breaking. Without Roger there to face him, radioactive in judgment, it’s almost natural.

“I was hoping for one night. Tonight. Just you and me, that’s all. Not… fighting, no drummers laid up in hospital, no narrowly averted crises or tragedy or impending misery.”

He sighs into something approaching a laugh, his shoulders sunken in acceptance. It’s a pipe dream, the idea of a night without chaos. For The Who, chaos is oxygen.

“Fat chance, I know. But I think about it all the time. San Francisco, I mean. And then I wonder, what it might have been like, if we hadn’t been interrupted. If we hadn’t been scared half to death in the first place. If I ever would have marshaled the courage to... well. You know.”

He doesn’t want to repeat it. There’s an absurdity to the verb, when applied to the two of them. _Kissing_. Ugh. It’s what he does with women, his wife, the occasional shameful tryst with a girl on a tour bus in advance of far more shameful betrayals.

What he’s done with Roger doesn’t even feel like a betrayal. Or shameful. He debates whether this should be cause for concern.

“That’s all I wanted,” Pete murmurs, likely too quietly for Roger to even hear. He doubts it matters any longer. “Don’t ask me why because I can’t begin to explain. But if you’ll have me, I’ll stay. You asked me that night. To stay.”

Pete hears movement in the bathroom and steps away. He holds his palms in the air, reflexively, declaring his own pre-emptive surrender.

Roger opens the door. He doesn’t seem afraid anymore. In the unforgiving fluorescent glare, Pete can see every line in his face, the full breadth of the shadows darkening underneath his eyes.

Roger is the oldest among them but has never looked it. For once, he appears well beyond his 31 years, contemplative, resigned. If Pete weren’t such a livewire current of fervent, Hail-Mary hope, he might even regret his whole monologue. It seems to have affected Roger like a wound.

“We’re on our way to Louisiana tomorrow,” Roger says, tentatively, and then corrects himself. “Today.”

“I know.”

“Seven in the morning, we’re back on the road.” Roger exhales, shakily still, glancing at himself in the mirror and then quickly averting his eyes, as if not liking what’s there. “Think that gives us a few hours.”

Pete’s heart leaps into his throat. He checks his watch, still thrust hours ahead in time, cast over an ocean. “Um. Yeah. Five, actually, if we’re being conservative. You want me to page the front desk? Set us a wake-up call?”

“I’ll get us up in time,” says Roger, brushing by him before Pete can think to react, and confidently enough that it doesn’t occur to him to argue.

“Right. OK.”

Roger drifts to the edge of the bed and sits. He buries his head in his hands, elbows propped on his knees. He stays that way for a long while.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go?” Pete asks, vaguely terrified. “I can go.”

“No,” says Roger, muffled but firm.

Pete nods uselessly to himself. He can’t think of anything better to do, so he goes and clicks the television off. The image of the American reporter shrinks in on itself and disappears. In its place, warped by the curvature of the screen, is his own lanky reflection in the dark.

“Pete,” Roger says, in a small voice, but clearly now. Pete turns to him.

“Yeah?”

“You told me something not too long ago, and I’d been thinking about it.” Roger chews his lip. His arms are stiffened at his sides now, fingers clenched into the edge of the mattress. “At the time I wasn’t completely sure what you meant, but I think I know, now.”

Pete approaches cautiously and takes a seat beside him, at a distance that could be considered risky. If he leans heavily enough on one arm, their little fingers might brush together.

“Last summer, you said that nothing would ever change us.” Even though Roger is looking away again, apparently fixated on some invisible spot on the wall, Pete spies a flicker of a wince. “Do you recall that?”

Pete blinks. Now it’s his turn to fold, head hung over his feet.

“Yes. I do.”

“Then promise me.”

The request takes him by surprise. Pete jerks up a little, then swivels his head to stare. Roger takes a deep breath, and looks back at him. It hits like a fist to his stomach.

“I promise,” says Pete, bemused but without hesitation. Roger searches his face, hunting for the faintest sign or tremor, any small glint of insincerity. To his credit, Pete has been known to lie.

He’s not lying about this. It might be the one miraculous instance in which he finds himself constitutionally incapable. He doesn’t need to promise, after all; he _knows_. Even if everything around them clatters to pieces, if the band itself goes up in fiery glory, their matchstick kingdom set inevitably ablaze, he can honestly attest that he’d never feel any differently about Roger. He’s tried and failed. What they’ve got is as infuriatingly permanent as it is ineffable.

Placated at last, Roger pitches over sideways, eyes rolling shut, and flops into the pillow.

Pete chuckles in spite of himself. “Tired?”

“You have no idea.”

“Actually, I think I do.”

Roger doesn’t contest the assertion. Instead, he draws his feet up from the floor and stretches his legs out over Pete’s lap. With some effort, Pete figures out how to unlace his boots and kick them off with minimal disturbance, while Roger reclines halfway over him like a cat. The sight pries a yawn out of Pete, deep and cavernous and irrefutable, so great it makes his jaw sore and his ears pop.

Sleep seems like the right idea, what few hours of it they can ferret away before sunrise. Roger has a terrible time sleeping, Pete knows; there’s a deceptive peacefulness to how he’s arranged himself on the bedspread, folded his hands under his cheek. Too picturesque to be real.

Pete is sweaty, disheveled, stained here and there with the dried remains of all that’s transpired. Satisfied nonetheless, he takes a final, hard look at their surroundings. By all accounts it is another anonymous hotel room, manufactured to be pleasant and forgettable. Pete has not yet managed to stay in the same room twice. After fifteen years of touring, that seems to defy statistical probability. Surely he’s overdue for a coincidence or two.

This one, as with San Francisco, he’ll remember with fragments of unusual specificity. An ugly bedspread in one, white-painted bathroom door in the other. In both, an empty glass and wine bottle. A television flashing meaningless patterns, talking and saying nothing.

By design, these are temporary spaces. Transitional, irreproducible. As such, Pete had once thought of them as possessing a hallucinatory quality. Hotel rooms, and what went on within them, existing just outside of time, a parallel universe stitched underneath like a lining, visible if you pulled at the seams.

He wonders, conversely, if he’s had it wrong all along. Precisely backwards. Maybe here, this room, is more real and indelible than any other place he’s ever visited. It is the singularity of _once and never again_.

Gently, Pete slides himself out from underneath Roger’s legs. He lies on his back for several minutes, listening to the steady lull of Roger’s breathing and picking at the scab on his wrist, which he knows he’ll be chided for in the morning. Eventually, he rolls to his side, and extends an arm round Roger’s waist, head ducking against his shoulder.

He can’t tell if it’s Roger’s breath catching in response, or steam from the radiator.

Pete’s eyes flutter closed. Exhausted sleep overtakes him like a wave.

When he dreams, he dreams of Brighton Beach. He is standing in the sand, facing the water. It races up around his feet, churning at his ankles, rushing out and then coming back to greet him. He is soaked through from his knees to his boots, the sun high in the sky and hot on his skin. If he could, he would stay here forever.

He gazes out at the horizon, at the strings of clouds that will one day gather and knit themselves into thunderheads, spitting their torrents back down onto the English coast. For now, they drift unhurriedly with the breeze.

It’s a threat so far off as to be inconsequential. Pete turns, his arms crossed against his chest and a wild, joyful smile on his face.

He marches up the beach, toward the sound of voices and laughter, beckoned by the colorful, tilting spokes of the Ferris wheel.

It is a fine summer’s day, and he intends to enjoy it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! Thank you, as always, for reading! It was time for them to do some talking, with a record-breaking quantity of f-bombs, and... also do some not-talking! The best kind of not-talking. It was also, at long last, time for the both of them to get some decent sleep.


End file.
